Isidore-Stanislas
Helman’s print after Charles Monnet’s drawing of the execution of
Louis XVI, Journée du 21 Janvier 1793 [Image
14],
is a good example of ritualized violence.48 As
Paul Connerton remarked in How
Societies Remember,

The ceremony of his [Louis
XVI’s]
trial and execution was intended to exorcise the
memory of a prior ceremony. The anointed head was
decapitated and the rite of coronation ceremonially
revoked. Not simply the natural body of the king
but also and above all his political body was killed. In
this the actions of the revolutionaries borrowed
from the language of the sacred which for so long
the dynastic realm had appropriated as its own.49

This ritual
aspect of the royal execution is particularly symbolized
by Helman/Monnet in the placement
on the right of the empty pedestal that formerly supported
Bouchardon’s
statue of Louis XV (torn down on August 9, 1792) as a compositional
counterbalance to the guillotine and the enacted violence on
the left. Together they become the embodiment of a voided
kingship.50

Image
14. Journée
du 21 Janvier 1793. [The Execution of Louis XVI]

The
moment represented in Helman’s print, namely, the display of
the head—the executioner held it up while
he circled the scaffold twice—51 deliberately
emphasized the ritual of sacrifice.52 (One
cannot help wondering whether the revolutionaries recalled
the description in Tacitus’s Annales (I:LXI) when
the German [Gallic or Celtic] Arminius destroyed
the troops of Varus and displayed the severed Roman heads on
trees.)53 Above
all, Helman’s print stresses the ritual aspect
of this execution by the ordered lines of 80,000 “men,
national guards, and policemen” who controlled the space
and served as a barrier between the people and the execution
in the Place de la Révolution;54 by
the absence of women; and by the stern decorum of the crowd,
mostly young men, before us but behind
the troops, a number of whom appear to shout as they view the
severed head. (They are said to have cried, “‘Long
live the nation! Long live the Republic!’”).55

While
the authorities wanted the citizens of Paris to act with propriety
to prove “that
an act of justice in no way resembles vengeance,”56 there
were, nevertheless, signs of vengeance at the ceremonial execution
itself. The fédérés of Marseilles,
the principal victims of the August 10th assault
on the Tuileries, were placed immediately in front of the scaffold.57 Earlier
at the trial of Louis XVI, cries of vengeance had resounded
among the deputies, with the Girondins,
who considered the execution unnecessary for the establishment
of a republic, repudiating the Jacobin
exhortations. One Girondin,
Joseph Guiter, viewed regicide as a “misguided form of
human sacrifice” to freedom and equality.58 Hence,
for contemporary viewers of the print, the troops and the public
spectators in the image, that
is, those attending and witnessing this spectacle of the display
of the severed trophy-head, would have been regarded as complicit
in the execution.59 In
that, they are little different from those complicit in the
murder of Foulon or Berthier de Sauvigny;
the revelers returning from Versailles; or even the spectators
at the May 6, 1777 execution of the poisoner Antoine-François
Derues on the Place de Grève.60

What was different,
however, were the shouts of the crowd after the royal execution
(depicted
by Helman), symbolizing, to use Susan Dunn’s
terms, “the myth of a phoenix-like republic
rising from the blood of the dead king.”61 In
that sense, Helman’s image incorporates ritualized
violence; participatory violence (the three executioners);
complicit violence; as well as symbolic violence, the violence
of a new government and some of its representatives.62 The
definition of “violence,” we
must recall, included “violent
passion,” something that is transmitted
by the printmaker in the connection between the display of
the king’s
head and the upraised arms and the visible, rather than aural,
shouts of the people and the troops.

Having
examining the types of violence represented in these images,
as well as the various representational
strategies the artists used, we might well ask how these prints
contribute to our historical knowledge of specific historical
events. One of the basic problems of visual images is their
relationship to the concept of narrative. Unlike the various
written accounts, reports, and memoirs of events which can
discuss a series of events over time, the image-makers, despite
what Watelet promoted, were reduced to showing a single moment,
or several consecutive moments, within one image, such as the
fall of the Bastille, and the execution of Louis XVI. Such
a time constraint, with, at best, a compression of several
moments into a single visualization, restricts the information
that can be conveyed. Nevertheless, it is clear that images
such as the prints by Berthault/Prieur [Images1,
8, 25 and
26]
and Helman [Images 14, 16 and 27],
as well as drawings by Prieur [Image
31]
provide us with invaluable information about setting, costume,
the articles of everyday life, the behavior of the crowd,
physiognomy of specific individuals, and the like,63 which
is impossible to get from the written accounts of the time,
and that knowledge can be supplemented
with similar information from other images, for example,
Janinet’s
prints (see Image
5). Still
other works have to
be treated gingerly as a source. As
Claudette Hould has pointed out, one of the first popular
prints of the
attack on the Bastille
was executed by Nicolas Dupin for the Révolution de Paris,
which appeared only in October 1789, and which was subsequently
adopted as a model by other printmakers for their own images
of the event,64 and
this, like some memoirs, conveys only a certain amount of
information, much of it inaccurate.

At
the same time, the ubiquity of these images offers a different
perspective on “historical
knowledge”. For
their prevalence tells us not only that the printmakers thought
that such images had commercial value and would sell65 but
also that their popularity came from their symbolic value,
souvenirs or “memory
triggers” of a momentous event, which operated
to perpetuate symbolic events.66 As
in the case of written accounts of these events, these visualizations
are constructions, subject
to the personal/political interpretations of their authors. They
are subject also to the multiple readings of their audiences,
including those in this forum. Hence, some images may be interpreted
as ambiguous (Robert’s Bastille [Image
28]); as possibly
ironic (Journée mémorable de Versailles [Image
6]);
or even reinterpreted as tragic (Helman’s execution of Louis XVI [Image
14]). Regardless
of the intent of the author, images, just like texts, will
always have multiple interpretations, which
are affirmed, contested, refined, and refrained.

Notes

48 On
the print, see Rousseau-Lagarde and Arasse, La Guillotine
dans la Révolution, p.49 and fig.44
as well as Hould, L’Image,
p. 277 and pl. 75. This print was the eighth plate of a series
entitled Principales journées de la Révolution.

49 Paul
Connerton, How Societies Remember,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 9. See especially
Michael Walter, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the
Trial of Louis XVI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1974, introduction; Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI. Regicide
and the French Political Imagination, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994; and Antoine de Baecque, Glory and
Terror. Seven Deaths under the French Revolution, trans.
Charlotte Mandell, New York and London: Routledge, 2001, pp.
86-119, who devotes a chapter to the execution of Louis XVI
and also makes the same point (p. 91): “By
thus sacrificing Louis XVI, the Republic immolates the sacredness
with which the body of the king was still invested.”

50Image
11, Le plus grand des Despotes renversé par
la Liberté, shows the dismantling
of the statue of Louis XIV in the Place Vendome, but in August
1792,
other statues of Henri IV, Louis XV in various sites were
also destroyed. See Hould, L’Image,
pp. 254-55 and the catalogue La Révolution française et
l’Europe 1789-1799, vol. II,
pp. 430-432, where the remaining fragments are shown. The
destruction and debates about it are discussed in Edouard
Pommier, L’Art de la liberté, Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1991.

52 See
Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis
XVI. Regicide and the French Political Imagination,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, chapter one, “The
Cult of Human Sacrifice.” Dunn mentions the work of
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Sacrifice: Its Nature and
Function,
1898; reprinted Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1964. See also Walter Burkert, Structure and History
in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Berkeley: The University
of California Press, 1979, esp. pp. 59-77, “Transformations
of the Scapegoat.” Burkert
states: “The
process can be brought into a nearly perfect Lévi-Straussian
formula, the scapegoat being the mediator who brings about
the reversal from common danger to common salvation: the
situation ‘community
endangered’ versus ‘individual distinguished’ is
turned into ‘individual
doomed’ versus ‘community
saved’....”(p.
67).

58 Dunn, The
Deaths of Louis XVI,
pp. 21-23. What also comes to mind is the summary beheading
of some of Caesar’s enemies in his account of the
conquest of Gaul. See Julius Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul,
trans. by S. A. Handford, Middlesex: Penguin, 1951, p. 161,
where Indutiomarus, chief of the Treveri, is beheaded and p.
254, where Gutuater, leader of the Carnutes, is flogged and
his head cut off. Eighteenth-century Frenchmen, well-schooled
in the classics, would certainly have been familiar with this
text.

62 What
was not depicted, at least explicitly, were the actions of
the people following the moment depicted
by the artist, when they eagerly tried to get drops of Louis’ blood
on a handkerchief, cloth, sword, or to collect pieces of his
hair: parts of a tyrant or parts of a martyr, depending on
the interpretations of the collectors. See de Baecque, Glory
and Terror, pp. 106-107, 114 and La Famille royale à Paris
de l’histoire à la
legende, Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 1993. See, however,
Image
15, where the locks of Louis XVI’s hair are visible left of center
beneath the platform of the guillotine. Thus, in this symbolic
patricide, the people acquired “parts” of
Louis, a symbolic mutilation, if not actual as in the case
of Foulon.

Villeneuve’s
print, Manière à réflection pour les jongleurs couronnées,
showing a hand holding up head dripping blood, alludes to this
symbolic violence. On this image and others, see Annie Duprat, Le
Roi décapité. Essai sur les imaginaires politiques, Paris:
Cerf, 1992. See also the illustration and entry in French
Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789-1799, Los Angeles:
Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Wight Art Gallery, University
of California, Los Angeles, 1989, pp. 194-95, ill. 90; Ronald
Paulson, “The
Severed Head: The Impact of French Revolutionary Caricatures
on England,” pp.
55-65 in the same exhibition catalogue; and the brief discussion
in de Baecque, Glory and Terror, pp. 101-102.

63 Hould, “Les Tableaux
historiques de la Révolution française: mémoire et révision
de l’Histoire,” in Les Tableaux historiques
de la Révolution française, p. 38, compared the Helman
prints to those by Berthault and noted that the architectural
detail in the Helman is more cursory and inexact.